RECYCLE: And here's an idea

I appreciate Mr. Mello’s frustration with some recycling of small paper, but most Idahoans don’t recycle anything. And his column just encourages more non-participation.

The community where I live has half a dozen 96-gallon recycling bins for 200 resident?ial spaces. It’s a token effort.

Cardboard has so much value people steal the compressed bales. Cardboard is easily recyclable.

Aluminum cans are actually an alloy that includes aluminum; otherwise it couldn’t be rolled into thin cans. This type of aluminum recycling is happening in Post Falls on Pleasant View near Prairie.

The newspaper you are reading is made into ASTM roofing felt in many places.

Wet cell batteries are melted down. The lead sinks to the bottom and the plastic goes to the top.

Metal is valuable. Sheet metal scraps at $60 a ton while thicker metal is $80 a ton. Clean aluminum is $600 a ton.

And doesn’t all the non-recyclable paper and plastic sent to the Waste Management single stream sort facility in west Spokane just end up in the cogeneration trash burner by GEG airport?

Isn’t sending Idaho’s trash to Washington a win-win for Idaho either way?

?Idaho needs to not become a South Carolina whom their own former Governor Mark Sanford called “the pay toilet of the East Coast” with their super landfills serving other states.

Or worse, Idaho landowners filling their own land with trash. I have cleaned up 90 tires on 10 acres this year! I had to move a trench for a water line because of all the buried steel pipe and fence wire! I found buried transmissions and even a fuel tank or two that had fuel still in them! We’re better than this!

If in doubt, don’t throw it out. Please recycle! Send it to WASHINGTON!

MIKE RENO

Post Falls